**Blindfolded and beaten ****Lipkhan Bazaeva, who runs an organisation called Women’s Dignity, says brides are often brought in by mothers-in-law who believe the girl is possessed by evil spirits or “genies”. **
“Just imagine - her son has stolen a girl he liked and married her. What they want is a nice, quiet, hard-working woman in the house, not someone who’s feeling down from the moment she wakes up and who’s hysterical in the evening. So they take them to the mullah.”
]('Exorcisms' performed on Chechen stolen brides - BBC News)
Mullah Mairbek Yusupov is a small bearded man dressed in a green surgeon-style top and skull-cap. He appeared pleasant enough to me, softly spoken, until I saw him at work.
**The patient was lying blindfolded on her back, wearing a long, flowery robe. Mairbek began yelling verses from the Koran into her ear and beating her with a short stick. **
“She feels no pain,” he said. “We beat the genie and not the patient.”
The woman, probably in her early twenties, was writhing on the bed: “Shut up! Leave me alone,” she growled.
Mairbek claimed this strange voice belonged to the genie possessing her. He shouted back: “Take your claws out of this woman. Aren’t you ashamed? Go on! Leave her body like you did last time, through her toe.”
With a deadpan expression, Mairbek explained that the genie inside the girl was 340 years old.
He was not a Muslim - he was a Russian man called Andrei and he had fallen in love with his victim.
**The genie was so jealous that he made her leave her husband. “It was a tough case,” he added. This was already the seventh time he had treated this patient. **
Later I spoke to the girl’s aunt, who had also watched the exorcism. She said her niece was stolen at the age of 16 and had since been through two divorces.
**“She wants to be alone all the time,” she sighed. “She doesn’t want to talk or see anyone and nothing makes her happy.” **
The girl’s despairing family were hoping doctors at the Centre could turn her into an obedient wife so they could marry her off again.
** Tragedy **
A few days later I met Marryat, another patient. She had been stolen for marriage but found her kidnapper was already married to somebody else. Now she is convinced that his first wife put a curse on her in the form of two genies.
**When she split from her husband, Marryat had to give up her baby son. **
**According to Chechen traditions, after divorce children are raised by the husband and in-laws. Former wives almost never get custody despite their rights under Russian law. It is considered shameful to go to court. **
I asked Mairbek if he always blamed the genies for marital breakdown. Perhaps, I suggested, some women are traumatised by being abducted and forced into marriage or by losing their children?
Mairbek was dismissive.
“We have so many young girls with these problems. I had a patient today whose genie tells her she should divorce, that her husband doesn’t love her; that she shouldn’t stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of the children.”
“But that’s just the genie trying to get its own way and we have to put a stop to that,” he said.
Whatever I felt about his methods, Mairbek did not strike me as a sadistic man.
I was struck by the readiness of patients and relatives alike to accept the treatment, and even to come back for more.
The therapy is a way of making them accept, or at least deal with, what has happened. But, it is most of all, an expression of their powerlessness.
The tragedy of these women is that they have nowhere else to go.
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